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1930s Leitz VALAU ring in nickel for the Elmar lens

Toronto. Leitz first introduced the Leica in the mid 1920s to keep employment up at their optical works in Wetzlar during extreme inflation in Germany. Bad timing as it turned out. A few years later, the dirty 30s hit with a world wide depression.

Leitz was busy encouraging photographers to buy their well built, well designed tiny camera at a time when large cameras and contact prints or slightly enlarged prints were the norm. A lot of effort went into assuring potential buyers that a small negative could create a large print of pleasing resolution through enlarging.

Money was tight in the 1930s and Leitz promoted its Elmar 5cm lens as ideal both on the camera and on the enlarger. Those of us who developed and enlarged film a few decades ago know that when enlarging you open the enlarging lens wide open to focus and then stop it down a couple of stops or more to expose the photo paper. This process means focussing with a bright image and narrow depth of field then printing with a dimmer light for a longer period with a wider depth of field to compensate for any discrepancy in focussing. Generally, stopping a lens down a couple of stops was said to improve the resolution.

The problem with the 5cm Elmar is that the aperture is controlled by a tiny tab on the front of the lens.  Almost impossible to see in a darkroom with the lens pointing down. The solution was a ring called a VALAU that moved the tab while transferring the setting to the edge of the lens and converting it to an exposure multiple for correct photo paper exposure (eg. 1 for wide open, 2 for double the exposure, 4 for four times the exposure, etc. instead of f/stops). The tab shown above acted as a very weak click stop.

The title of this post is a riff on the 1950s British movie called “Value for Money” and the expression “value for the money” meaning a good deal for the buyer.